Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 19hr ago

Hi Y'all. This is a test of shady thinking and not one-shotted into an LLM. But I endorse this essay and invite criticism. I worked on this. My reason for posting this is to learn more about this state of affairs in the responses.

Two Badges, Two Bloodlines: Sheriffs and Police in America

American law enforcement is often described, lazily, as a single institution — "the police" — but it is actually two distinct institutions wearing similar uniforms. One, the sheriff, is nearly a thousand years old and answers to voters. The other, the municipal police department, is barely two hundred years old and answers to a mayor or city manager through an appointed chief. They patrol overlapping ground, sometimes literally the same streets, but they come from different lineages, hold different kinds of authority, and occasionally collide over exactly whose ground it is.

The Shire-Reeve: Where the Sheriff Comes From

The sheriff's office is the older of the two by a wide margin, and its origin is genuinely Anglo-Saxon. In pre-Norman England, the kingdom was divided into administrative units called shires — the ancestor of the modern English "county" or "-shire" suffix (Yorkshire, Hampshire). Each shire was overseen by a royal official called a scir-gerefa, or "shire reeve": the king's local representative, responsible for collecting taxes, enforcing royal law, presiding over the shire court, and raising the posse comitatus — literally "the power of the county," an ad hoc militia the reeve could summon from the free men of the area. "Shire reeve" contracted over centuries into "sheriff."

The Norman Conquest of 1066 didn't erase this office; it absorbed it. The Normans kept the sheriff as the crown's man in the county, a dual tax-collector-and-lawman role that persisted through the medieval period. Crucially, the sheriff's authority was territorial and comprehensive within the shire — not tied to a town, a court, or a single function, but to the entire county as a jurisdiction. That territorial, county-wide model is the DNA the office still carries in America today.

Two related medieval offices are worth naming because their vocabulary survives:

The constable, originally a royal household officer (from the Latin comes stabuli, "count of the stable"), evolved into a parish- or town-level peacekeeping role — unpaid, rotating, and much more local and narrow than the sheriff's county-wide writ. This is the ancestor of the "town constable" and, more distantly, of municipal policing generally.
The bailiff, from Old French bailli (an official who administers on behalf of another, ultimately from Latin bajulus, "one who bears a burden"), executed the orders of a lord or court — serving writs, collecting debts, seizing property. A bailiff's area of authority was his bailiwick — "bailie" (bailiff) plus the Old English suffix -wic (a dwelling, settlement, or district, from Latin vicus). "Bailiwick" has since drifted into general usage to mean anyone's particular sphere of responsibility, but it began as a literal, mapped jurisdiction — a useful word to keep in mind, because jurisdiction-as-geography is the whole story of sheriff versus police.

The Break: Why "Police" Is a Different Animal

For centuries, the Anglo-American world had no professional, salaried, full-time police force in the modern sense. Law enforcement was a patchwork of sheriffs, constables, night watchmen, and private thief-takers. That system buckled under the pressure of industrialization and urbanization — London's population exploded in the early 1800s, and crime, riot, and disorder outran what part-time constables and a county sheriff could handle.

The fix, in 1829, was Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police of London — the first modern, professional, centrally organized, uniformed civilian police force, deliberately built as something new: full-time, salaried, hierarchically commanded, and answerable to the Home Secretary rather than to a county or a court. This is the template — "policing," as a bureaucratic, city-based, appointed institution — that spread to American cities in the following decades: Boston organized a police department in 1838, New York City in 1845, and other major cities followed through the mid-1800s, explicitly copying the London model.

So while the sheriff descends from feudal county administration, the police department descends from a nineteenth-century urban reform movement — a different century, a different problem (industrial-city disorder rather than rural shire governance), and a different organizational logic (appointed bureaucracy rather than personal county officer).

The American Twist

Colonial America imported the sheriff wholesale — county government in Virginia, Maryland, and elsewhere was built around an appointed (later elected) sheriff almost from the start, and many American county sheriff's offices predate the founding of their own states. But America made one significant change: it made the office elected, generally by direct popular vote of the county. This is a genuinely American democratization of a medieval crown office, and it is the single most important structural fact about the American sheriff. A sheriff answers to the county electorate directly, on a fixed term, not to a city council, a mayor, or a police commission.

It's also worth being honest that American policing has more than one point of origin. Alongside the Peelian municipal-police strand in the urban North, the antebellum South developed organized slave patrols — armed groups authorized to stop, search, and control enslaved people and enforce curfews — which historians widely identify as a direct institutional ancestor of many Southern police departments after the Civil War. The frontier added a third strand: town marshals, federal U.S. Marshals (a role explicitly modeled on the English sheriff, exported to federal territory), and vigilance-committee policing in areas without formal government. American law enforcement, in other words, is a braid of at least three lineages — feudal county sheriff, urban professional police, and Southern slave-patrol/frontier policing — not one clean line.

How They Differ Today

	Sheriff	Municipal Police
Origin	Anglo-Saxon shire-reeve, county crown officer	19th-century professional bureaucracy (Peel's Met)
Selection	Usually elected countywide	Chief appointed by mayor/city manager
Jurisdiction	Entire county, especially unincorporated land	City limits only
Core duties	Jail operation, court security, civil process (evictions, subpoenas, warrants), rural/unincorporated patrol	Street patrol, investigations, traffic enforcement within city
Accountability	Directly to voters	To executive/legislative city government
Term	Fixed election cycle	Serves at pleasure of appointing authority

The jurisdictional split is the practical heart of it. City police have authority within the city's boundary; the sheriff's office has authority across the entire county, which matters most in unincorporated areas that have no city government of their own and therefore no municipal police force at all — there, the sheriff is the only game in town. Sheriffs also tend to accumulate the "custodial" functions of the justice system almost everywhere in the U.S.: they typically run the county jail, provide security for county courthouses, and serve civil process (the actual physical delivery of eviction notices, subpoenas, and warrants) — functions that trace directly back to the medieval bailiff's job of executing a court's orders. Municipal police, by contrast, are built around active patrol, 911 response, and criminal investigation within a bounded city.

Antagonism, Overlap, and Turf

Because a city sits inside a county, city police and the county sheriff usually have concurrent jurisdiction over the same physical ground — both technically have authority there, even though in practice the city department handles the overwhelming majority of day-to-day calls. That overlap is a standing source of friction, for a few recurring reasons:

Political independence. Because a sheriff is separately elected, they can't be fired by a mayor or city council, and they don't answer to a police chief's chain of command. This makes sheriffs more likely to act as independent political actors — publicly breaking with a governor, a mayor, or federal policy on issues from immigration enforcement to gun regulation — in a way an appointed police chief, who serves at someone's pleasure, rarely can.
Resource and prestige competition. Sheriff's offices and police departments compete for the same county and state grant dollars, and high-profile investigations sometimes produce genuine disputes over who has the lead.
Legal ambiguity. In many states the sheriff is constitutionally or statutorily named the "chief law enforcement officer" of the county — a title that on paper outranks the city police chief within that county, even though in practice the sheriff has, by long custom, ceded routine law enforcement inside the city to the police department. That ceding is customary, not always legally absolute, which leaves a latent authority the sheriff can — in unusual circumstances — reassert.

Case Study: Atlanta and Fulton County

Atlanta is a clean illustration of the whole arrangement, with a wrinkle: the city sits mostly in Fulton County but partly spills into DeKalb County, meaning Atlanta technically has two county sheriffs whose jurisdictions touch it, alongside its own police department.

Day-to-day policing inside the city — patrol, 911 response, investigations — is the job of the Atlanta Police Department, a municipal force answerable to the mayor. Because Atlanta is almost entirely incorporated territory, the Fulton County Sheriff's Office doesn't patrol city streets in the way a rural county sheriff would patrol unincorporated land. Instead, its role is concentrated in the classic sheriff functions inherited from the bailiff/shire-reeve tradition: running the Fulton County Jail, providing security for county courtrooms and judges, and handling warrant service and civil process.

Georgia law makes the underlying tension explicit rather than leaving it implicit. The Georgia Constitution designates the sheriff as the chief law enforcement officer of the county, and in counties that also have a police department, the sheriff voluntarily relinquishes general law-enforcement responsibility to that department — but cannot be forced to, and retains authority to intervene in any law enforcement effort within the county, including situations where deputies witness a violation of law or where no police officer is present. That single sentence is the whole sheriff/police relationship in miniature: routine deference from the sheriff to the city police, backed by a constitutional reserve power the sheriff never actually gives up.

The Fulton County Jail on Rice Street is also a case study in why the sheriff's custodial role carries real political weight. The jail was built to hold about 1,125 people but has housed as many as 3,000, and the U.S. Department of Justice found in 2024 that conditions there were unconstitutionally "inhumane, violent and hazardous." Because the jail is a sheriff's-office responsibility rather than a police-department one, accountability for a crisis like that runs to the elected sheriff — currently Patrick "Pat" Labat, the 28th Sheriff of Fulton County — not to the Atlanta police chief or the mayor, even though the jail sits inside city limits and holds people arrested by city police. It's a good demonstration of how the sheriff/police division isn't just historical trivia; it determines, very concretely, who is politically on the hook when something goes wrong.

The Peelian Ideal and Its American Inversion

If the sheriff/police split explains the structure of American law enforcement, it says nothing about its philosophy — and here the American story is one of quiet drift from the very tradition it borrowed its organizational form from.

Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police was not built primarily as a crime-fighting machine. The nine principles credited to Peel and his first two commissioners, Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne, describe something closer to an anti-authoritarian bargain: police hold no more legal power than an ordinary citizen, their legitimacy rests entirely on public approval rather than on the capacity to coerce, physical force is a last resort and a sign of failure rather than of competence, and the true measure of police effectiveness is the absence of crime and disorder — not the volume of arrests or shows of force. The most quoted formulation, "the police are the public and the public are the police," makes the officer a citizen temporarily and narrowly deputized, not a separate caste standing over the public.

American cities adopted Peel's organizational form — the full-time, uniformed, hierarchical municipal department — while gradually losing the legitimacy theory that justified it. The shift is visible once policing gets reframed as a "war," first on crime and then on drugs: force stops being a last resort and becomes a demonstration of seriousness, and the public shifts from being the source of the department's authority to being a population the department manages. Chief William Parker's postwar rebuilding of the LAPD is a useful marker of this turn — a deliberately insulated, quasi-military force, professionalized in a way that was sold as incorruptibility but functioned as a wall between officers and the people they policed. His successor Daryl Gates, who also founded the country's first SWAT team, hardened that culture further into an aggressively proactive, adversarial style of policing.

The Rodney King beating in 1991, and the acquittal and riots that followed in 1992, is the right hinge point for this story because it made the inversion visible on videotape to people who had no reason to disbelieve it otherwise. The Christopher Commission's subsequent report did not describe a rogue incident; it described a department-wide subculture in which aggressive force functioned as a badge of competence, repeat offenders faced minimal internal accountability, and officers' own radio transcripts revealed open contempt for the people they were supposed to be serving. That is the Peelian bargain broken at its foundation — not "an officer used excessive force," but "the institution's internal incentives no longer route back to public consent as the source of its authority."

The pattern has recurred since, at Ferguson in 2014 and Minneapolis in 2020, each producing its own commission and reform push, and each reasserting the same underlying culture once attention moved on. Two structural facts make a durable Peelian correction unusually hard in the U.S. First, the country never centralized on Peel's model of a single accountable authority — Britain has one national government able to set a uniform doctrine and standard, while the U.S. has roughly 18,000 separate law enforcement agencies, each led by an independently elected sheriff or an independently appointed chief, free to define "professionalism" on their own terms. Second, ironically, the same crisis that exposed the problem also armed it further: the federal 1033 program, which moved surplus military equipment into civilian police departments, expanded significantly in the years after Rodney King, not before.

Was Peel Right, and Did America Err?

Largely yes, and largely yes — with two important qualifications. Peel's core claim was not simply an ethical preference but a functional one: legitimacy and operating capacity are the same asset. A public that trusts police reports crimes, cooperates with investigations, and testifies as witnesses; a public that doesn't will produce worse crime control regardless of how aggressively a department is resourced, which then invites the aggression that erodes trust further. Every American departure from the Peelian model has tended to confirm this by producing worse outcomes on the department's own terms, not just on humanitarian ones.

The first qualification is that Peel designed his model for Georgian and Victorian London — a society without mass civilian gun ownership and with a far lower baseline rate of lethal violence than the modern United States. "The police hold no more power than an ordinary citizen" is harder to sustain as a working principle when the citizen being approached may be armed; that is a genuine complication of translating the model, not merely an excuse for abandoning it.

The second, more important qualification is that "American policing was corrupted away from a Peelian ideal" is not a story that fits the whole country evenly. In much of the South, policing's institutional starting point was not a consent-based force at all, but slave patrols and their Jim Crow-era successors — a lineage built from the outset on controlling a population rather than deriving authority from it. For a great many Americans, there was no earlier golden age of policing by consent to fall from; the "inversion" narrative fits the mid-century, Parker-to-Gates, LAPD-style story more precisely than it fits the country as a whole. What is fair to say is that wherever the Peelian bargain was genuinely in force, the postwar drift toward force-as-legitimacy measurably broke it — and Rodney King is the moment that drift became undeniable on camera.

Conclusion

The sheriff and the municipal police officer look almost interchangeable on the street — badge, gun, patrol vehicle — but they're products of different centuries and different political theories of accountability. The sheriff is a nine-hundred-year-old county officer, elected directly by the people he polices, whose core competencies (jails, courts, civil process) trace straight back to the medieval bailiff's bailiwick. The police officer is a nineteenth-century bureaucratic invention, appointed rather than elected, built for the city rather than the county, and designed to solve a problem — industrial urban disorder — that the shire-reeve system was never built for. Where their jurisdictions overlap, as they do in every American city sitting inside a county, that difference in lineage and accountability is exactly what produces friction: two law enforcement traditions, sharing a bailiwick, answering to two different masters.

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 22hr ago

Yes, I thought I would highlight the exact symmetry

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 1d ago

only a morally-degenerate person would support

... the killing of dependent and defenseless babies

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 1d ago

Everyone agrees that "being white is better than being non-white*: the question is in how whites obtained their Privileged position.

I disagree

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 1mo ago

You are speaking directly to me about a curious subject in a language and form that is deliciously accessible and insightful. Thanks for the talk, TED

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 2mo ago

Assigning everyone a role

This feels like hyperbole. Communist China assigns everyone a role, not the right in the US of A. But if it's just a premise, ok.

and holding them responsible for fulfilling

This is completely unobjectionable.

is still collectivist.

Only in the broadest sense of the term. Hierarchies exist and are natural; everyone has a boss.

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 2mo ago

The purpose of a company or firm is to produce profit: to coordinate on Monday to be wealthier on Tuesday. There is generally little concern about the consumer except so far as the production of the firm is deemed desirable by the consumer.

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 3mo ago

Your argument is wholly distinct from dailydogma's and more interesting, granted. But dd was saying that the prevention of a human from crossing a property boundary is a human rights violation. A very strange argument coming from a libertarian. I would like to know which human right that is, what it may conflict with, and the nature of the violation.

And while I agree that my analogy may not hold for various reasons, as it scales up and out, I argue that none of those reasons coincide with or support dailydogma's position. And I would be interested to know the scale at which dd believes it breaks down.

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 3mo ago

Put me down for Team Shakesneer, opposed to Team Rov_Scam.

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 3mo ago

I'm libertarian in that I oppose most international borders. The reason is that it violates human rights for very little justified purpose.

Do you lock your doors at night? Is your bedroom open to migrants? I assume not, for obvious reasons. Why don't those reasons apply to, say, the Longhouse of your tribe, or the City Hall at 3am, or your sovereign nation?

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 3mo ago

If the brain is a prediction machine, tricking it into playing video games is a fantastic way to get reps in. With tradeoffs, natch.

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 3mo ago

Current project is a Holdem (poker) website, multiplayer or single-player with bots, implemented in Elixir, using Event Sourcing and CQRS architecture. Nearly feature complete for a first draft, I am on the cusp of making it available for people to bang on.

Briefly:

Play chips, no money
No-friction profile and wallet tracking (no passwords: cookies and tokens)
High-fidelity hand history, for real-time or post-hoc analysis
The bots you play against can also advise your play

Rationale:

I was around for poker boom 1.0, with Chris Moneymaker winning the World Series of Poker, back when it was hosted at Binion's, in the Rounders era. We are now in the second wave, GTO, Game Theory Optimal. A completely different meta with different terminology has evolved in the last 10-15 years. I got one goshdarn Doug Polk video in my viewing history, and now I'm nerdsniped into learning about GTO poker, having played maybe 3 poker games in the last 20 years.

So I needed to get my reps in, and I needed advice. Possibly from LLMs. Who could watch my own gameplay and decision making and tell me about my decision, additionally providing new-meta (and old-meta) analysis that should feed better decisions. And I need a lot of reps. So what I have really built is a poker trainer, disguised as free-to-play multiplayer site. I just want to be placed into a realistic situation, with limited information, and train myself to make good decisions.

The crux of this is a so-called "hand history" format that is easy to read and follow, yet informationally complete. I have not found any free poker site that provides a useful hand history for this. So I'm building one. I have a freemium revenue model banging around the back of my brain somewhere.

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 3mo ago

I have a ballistics library which includes tons of real-world cartridges and is primarily concerned with estimating muzzle velocity for arbitrary barrel lengths. This would be most applicable to a a sim-style shooter like Tarkov or milsim stuff that wants real world cartridges with real world data. I have the basics for POI relative to POA but zero collision detection with terrain or objects. That much is technically out of scope for my project, which is more of a ballistics database than any sort of engine. But designed to hook up to an engine.

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 5mo ago

Spendy, but check out https://www.maisonmargiela-fragrances.us I am familiar with their Replica collection, like "Jazz Club", "By The Fireplace", etc.

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 5mo ago · Edited 5mo ago

Disclaimer: this post was written with LLM assistance; the ideas are mine, and I stand behind them

The Simp/Pimp Dialectic: Authenticity and Cultural Knowledge in 1980s-90s Hip-Hop

The term "simp" emerged in 1980s West Coast hip-hop not simply as the antonym of "pimp," but as a more nuanced critique of inauthenticity, cultural shallowness, and failed masculine performance. While contemporary usage has flattened the term into a simple insult for male submission to women, its original deployment by artists like Too Short, E-40, and Sir Mix-A-Lot encoded a sophisticated commentary on taste, realness, and the difference between genuine cultural knowledge and mere posturing. Understanding "simp" requires moving beyond the binary opposition of dominance versus submission and recognizing it as a term that could simultaneously attack both the fake player and the genuinely weak—united by their shared failure to embody authentic masculine competence within Black urban culture.

Too Short's description of a simp as a "knockoff pimp" is particularly revealing. The word "knockoff" suggests counterfeit goods—something designed to look like the real thing but fundamentally lacking in quality, craftsmanship, or authenticity. This framing positions the simp not as someone who has chosen a different path from pimping, but as someone attempting to inhabit that same space while failing utterly. The simp might put on the performance—talking the talk, claiming status, pursuing women—but lacks the genuine article beneath the surface. This interpretation aligns perfectly with hip-hop culture's broader obsession with "keeping it real" versus being exposed as fake, a distinction that could make or break an artist's credibility and, by extension, anyone's standing in the community.

Sir Mix-A-Lot's 1992 deployment of "simp" in "Baby Got Back" makes far more sense through this lens of authenticity versus superficiality than through any simple pimp/simp opposition. When he raps, "A lot of simps won't like this song / 'Cause them punks like to hit it and quit it / And I'd rather stay and play," he's not calling committed men simps—he's calling the "hit it and quit it" crowd simps because they're shallow, trend-following poseurs. These are men whose tastes have been colonized by mainstream (read: white) beauty standards, who chase after "Cosmo" ideals and "rock video" aesthetics rather than possessing the cultural depth to appreciate what Mix-A-Lot celebrates. They're fake because their desire is derivative, borrowed, inauthentic. They lack the connoisseur's eye, the deep cultural knowledge that would allow them to recognize and value what the mainstream dismisses. In this reading, the simp is culturally shallow—influenced by "skinny white girl culture" rather than grounded in authentic Black aesthetic appreciation.

Yet the term clearly also carried the "simpering weenie" meaning—the overly accommodating, submissive man who places too much value on women's approval and lacks the masculine self-possession that the pimp archetype embodied. This wasn't contradictory so much as it was targeting a different manifestation of the same fundamental failure: the absence of authentic masculine competence or "game." The 1992 Boyz II Men track "Sympin' Ain't Easy" captures this dimension, describing the degrading work of begging and pleading for female attention. Here the simp isn't pretending to be something he's not—he's genuinely weak, openly subordinate, transparently desperate. But both the fake player and the genuine weenie shared a common deficit: neither possessed real game, real knowledge, real cultural authority.

The semantic flexibility of "simp" allowed it to function as a catch-all critique of masculine inauthenticity in multiple registers. You could be a simp by being a poseur—someone trying to perform dominance or cultural knowledge you didn't actually possess. Or you could be a simp by being genuinely submissive—someone who had given up the performance entirely and openly accepted subordination. What united these uses was the fundamental assumption that authentic masculinity required a specific kind of cultural competence, self-possession, and freedom from both mainstream influence and female control. The pimp represented someone who had mastered this competence; the simp represented various modes of failure to achieve it.

This etymological complexity has been largely lost in the term's contemporary internet usage, which has reduced "simp" to a simple insult for male emotional availability or respect toward women. But the original 1980s-90s usage was far richer, encoding debates about authenticity, cultural capital, aesthetic discernment, and the performance of masculine competence within a specific subcultural context. The pimp/simp dichotomy wasn't really about control versus submission—it was about real versus fake, deep versus shallow, culturally grounded versus colonized by mainstream values. A simp could be someone faking dominance just as easily as someone genuinely submitting; what mattered was the failure to embody authentic masculine authority and cultural knowledge.

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 5mo ago

75% of your bodyweight in protein.

Wew, lad! What is your conversion factor, lbs to grams?

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 5mo ago

inhuman competitive forces.

Your point is taken and well-made, but I have to mention: Mises would disagree, but not Moloch!

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 6mo ago

Which facts are you disputing? The deadly weapon operated by Good was an automobile. Good struck the officer with her vehicle. Assault with a deadly weapon. Babbitt did not assault any police officer and was unarmed. Babbitt died while trying to breach a windowed door.

Which side is my side?

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 6mo ago

One was an assault on a police officer with a deadly weapon. The other was breaking and entering. I believe these have different thresholds for the use of deadly force.

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 6mo ago

Here is some more on CoT that I find related and interesting, but revolving around deception:

https://nickandresen.substack.com/p/how-ai-is-learning-to-think-in-secret

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 6mo ago

This is not my favorite @Dean post, but it's a good one. Dean, in my headcanon, is the moderately-more-successful-than-gwern autist but in a completely different dimension, and I love him (presumably) for that. One helluvan explainer.

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 6mo ago

Chris Bray has an interesting take

If you click on that last link, you’ll see a local TV news journalist going to one of the same daycare centers that Nick Shirley went to, and doing it long before. But you’ll also see a bunch of obvious differences in framing that turn out to be extremely important. Nick Shirley just said there are no children here; the mainstream journalist did a questions are being raised story, a “some claim” thing, noting the presence of regulatory violations. He even says out loud that he didn’t see any children at the supposed daycare center, but he can’t quite bring himself to stick the landing. He needs a government official to say that there are no children there. He needs an official narrative to advance. Watch for yourself if you want to see the difference.

There’s almost no difference between the facts aired by a Minneapolis TV station in January and the facts aired by Nick Shirley in December, but the tone and the framing are from a different universe. Mainstream journalists have been saying for years that some say there is fraud in Somali social services in Minneapolis. Controversy is swirling. Questions are being raised. Officials are looking into. Their instinctive focus is on narrative, on what is being said. They pull back. Nick Shirley races forward, and lavishes attention on the agitated response. Legacy media haven’t ignored the story; they’ve tiptoed up to its edges a thousand times.

See also the remarkable example of County Highway, which recently produced a long, detailed, deeply reported, and thoroughly grounded story on Somali social services fraud in Minneapolis, with eagle-eyed political context. Sample from a long story of what County Highway put into print well before the Nick Shirley video:

The state’s entire view of its role in society would soon change in ways that made the frauds far easier to execute. In 2016, Minnesota introduced a $35-million program that provided direct funding to state-based nonprofits working on issues of racial equity. Over the next few years, the state embraced an easily abused model of service delivery through private-sector clients, even as evidence mounted that these programs were beacons for fraudsters.

In 2018, a whistleblower claimed that over $100 million in payments through the state’s childcare assistance program had been fraudulent. The way the scam worked was dismayingly simple: Daycares and other childcare providers, which require a license to operate in Minnesota, would obtain names and identifying information for children eligible for state-subsidized care and then bill the government for services they hadn’t actually rendered. Mark Koran, a Republican state senator and former tax official who has worked closely on the fraud issue for nearly a decade and who I met in Saint Paul, said that millions of dollars in such proceeds were taken to East Africa in cash. In 2017, Twin Cities travelers declared $100 million in physical cash transfers out of the country to airport customs agents.

But this story produced something like a fraction of one percent of the attention that Nick Shirley got with a dramatic video, which is an…interesting thing to notice.

Swiss cheese: Information has to flow through a long series of gates that don’t overlap, overcoming the faked-up reactions and distractions, overcoming the absence of patience among consumers of information, overcoming official uninterest and calculated distortion, and probably a dozen other gates that we can think of if we put our heads together.

Note that the first point here collides with the second point: All the people saying that Nick Shirley suddenly just made up a fake story to get clicks or advance his evil far-right agenda run head-on into the problem of a decade of the same topic being discussed.

Nick Shirley wasn’t the first, or anything near it. But he was the one who broke through, for reasons that can be discovered and elaborated. That’s something to think about as we consider all the things that need to be dragged into the light in a sick political culture.

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 9mo ago

Wasn't it Lorenz who secretly surveiled a Clubhouse gathering only to falsely accuse Marc Andreesen of being retarded?

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 9mo ago

As Churchill said, nobody now mourns the native Americans beyond the vapid and entirely European absurdity of “land acknowledgements”.

What did he say?

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Nwallins Finally updated my bookmark 9mo ago

Compare and contrast to Joe Scarborough

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What is this place?

Why are you called The Motte?

New post guidelines

Rules

Recommended Posts And Communities

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>Unban in 4d 18h 31m

Nwallins

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>Unban in 4d 18h 31m

Nwallins

Two Badges, Two Bloodlines: Sheriffs and Police in America

The Shire-Reeve: Where the Sheriff Comes From

The Break: Why "Police" Is a Different Animal

The American Twist

How They Differ Today

Antagonism, Overlap, and Turf

Case Study: Atlanta and Fulton County

The Peelian Ideal and Its American Inversion

Was Peel Right, and Did America Err?

Conclusion

The Simp/Pimp Dialectic: Authenticity and Cultural Knowledge in 1980s-90s Hip-Hop